ROME -- The Public Prosecutor’s Office in Naples have opened an investigation into online ticket touting for the Napoli-Real Madrid Champions League match in March, judicial sources said Thursday.

 Naples prosecutors want to investigate the so-called “secondary ticket” websites offering ‘deals’ at dizzying prices -- four tickets for this Champions League match reached prices of over 25,000 euros, Il Fatto quotidiano reports.

  These football tickets are printed with the customers’ names and surnames, therefore are by definition non-transferable to third parties -- so these sellers are offering supposedly invalid tickets at exorbitant prices to the thousands of exasperated fans who did not manage to buy authorized tickets after hours of queueing.

 The Naples public prosecutor Vincenzo Piscitelli has passed the investigations onto his deputies Danilo De Simone and Stefano Capuano, specialized in sports events. The investigation is just an “explorative” one for now, Il Fatto writes, without hypotheses or specific people to be investigated.

 There were roughly 41,000 tickets available for this much-awaited Napoli-Real match at Naples’ San Paolo stadium, and they were run dry in six hours, leaving thousands of queueing fans extremely disappointed.

 Fans see this game as a rematch of the 1987-88 thrashing of Maradona’s Napoli by Real Madrid -- still a painful memory for many Napoli supporters.

 However, as soon as the sold-out sign was put up, ticket offers started appearing online, inevitably at hugely-inflated prices.

 President of Napoli football club and councillor for Lega Calcio Aurelio De Laurentiis issued a note, before news of the investigation spread, reminding people that it is not in any way possible to change the name on the ticket, and that entrance checks will be intensified.

 TicketOne went further, specifying that who sells named tickets online “is committing the crime of swindling.”

 nkd